Democracy Under Pressure

The 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November brought back memories of the optimism that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet empire. Today, however, liberal democracy appears to be in retreat. The politics of the world’s premier democracy, the United States, are plagued by polarization and paralysis; in Europe, economic tensions have brought fringe parties to the forefront. Russia has returned to an autocratic model of governance; China is still ruled by a Communist Party that limits freedoms; the hopes of the Arab Spring have largely been dashed; the Islamic State group’s rise testifies to the dangerous spread of religious absolutism.

“Democracy Under Pressure” was the subject of Athens Forum 2014, which was organized by the International New York Times with the participation of the newspaper Kathimerini and the governments of Athens and Greece. Following are excerpts from several of the participants.

Dmitri Trenin, director of the Moscow Center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Twenty-five years ago, when people started undermining and eventually overthrew the communist system in Russia, the vast majority of Russians identified with democracy. An 11th-hour attempt at reversing the tide in August 1991 collapsed because it seemed that everyone — even within the ranks of those who wanted to stop the process of reform — had been imbued with a bacillus of democracy and the things it represented.

But democracy in Russia transformed very quickly into a project for liberal reform that gave most of its benefits to the oligarchical few while disempowering and pauperizing the large majority of the Russian people. Those who called themselves “democrats” focused on reform, but not enough on gaining popular support for the process. Democracy came to be associated in people’s minds with chaos, poverty and weakness; the failure of the state to protect ordinary people; and humiliation on the international scene.

Vladimir Putin has been able to crack the code of stable power in Russia, which basically has two elements. One is that you have to be genuinely popular with the bulk of your people. There’s authoritarianism in Russia, no question, but it’s authoritarianism with the consent of the governed, or the majority of the governed, which makes it more stable.

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Waving a Russian flag in Simferopol, Ukraine.CreditUriel Sinai for The New York Times

The second element is control over the elites. From the oligarchs to the dissidents, they’re all very much under the control of Mr. Putin and the apparatus that he has built to ensure that there’s a strong state in Russia. (...)

I think that this fretting about democracy is misguided. It is based on the assumption, which I think is wrong, that the model of liberal democracy is something that is ready for the rest of the world to embrace, but for a couple of dictators.

I think we need to recognize that the world is diverse, and there will be diverse models of governance around the world. Some of them will be more liberal and more democratic. Some of them will be more illiberal. Some of them may be authoritarian for a period of time. What caused the collapse of the Soviet Union was the idea that socialism was built on “scientific foundations” laid down by Marx and Engels and was ready to be used by everyone around this world. And when this didn’t happen, people started having doubts.

Chrystia Freeland, journalist and Liberal Party member of the Canadian Parliament

We (I still consider myself half a journalist) are sometimes better at covering the exciting moment of revolutionary breakthrough than thinking carefully about the day after. The past 25 years haven’t been a defeat of the democratic idea — in fact, I think we’re seeing sustained and rather astonishing demand for democracy all over the world. What we’re seeing is that it’s really hard to follow through. We see that with Russia. We see that with the Arab Spring. We see that with Ukraine, which is now on its third democratic revolution in 25 years. But the demand is still there.

Democracy should be a verb, and not a noun. I’m Ukrainian-Canadian and an elected politician, and one of the paradoxes for me has been that in some ways young Ukrainians are more enthusiastically engaged in democracy than young Canadians, who have it. Democracy isn’t this thing that gets created once and that’s it. All of us have to be actively engaged. (...)

I think the threat to Western liberal democracy in the industrialized, wealthy West right now is figuring out an economic model that will deliver to the middle class. When the economic problem isn’t solved, it becomes a political problem.

The danger, I think, is that the people at the very top are not feeling economic pressure. Our economic model today is delivering to the very top more than ever, but if you don’t happen to live in that 0.1 percent world, things can be pretty dismal. If we don’t solve that problem pretty quickly, our democracy will get into trouble.

Eleni Tsakopoulos Kounalakis, former United States Ambassador to Hungary. Senior adviser, Albright Stonebridge Group

I’m the only panelist from the United States, so let me say a few words about what’s happened in the United States with our recession, the greatest economic downturn in the United States since the Great Depression in 1929. My sense is that the question of income inequality is going to be very much front and center in the next elections in 2016.

Yet I think that it’s important to recognize that around the world, entrepreneurs who have the opportunity to start their business in the United States will still, more than likely, prefer to be there than anywhere else, because of our system of rule of law. They don’t have some of the problems that plague newer democracies, with corruption and unpredictability.

I really liked what Chrystia Freeland said, that we should be thinking of democracy not as a noun but as a verb. Because it is. We cannot take democracy for granted. The people have to be involved and have to work vigilantly in order to ensure that it does deliver for people and continues to be perceived in the world as the best system to provide the most, for the biggest number of people.

Nikos Konstandaras, managing editor and columnist, Kathimerini

There was a lot of momentum in Greece in the post-dictatorship years, in 1974, and especially after the Socialist Party, Pasok, came to power. It had all the goodwill and momentum, to the point that it became extremely complacent. That complacency is, I think, is the greatest threat to democracy, in Greece and in Africa and in Europe and in America and everywhere else. A state has to find a way to deal with complacency, otherwise it becomes corrupt and accountable to nobody.

We have to remember that in ancient Athens democracy was not an idea thought up by people scratching their heads and wondering what to do to pass the time. Democracy came about because society was threatened, from without and from within, and the best way to deal with it was to enfranchise as many citizens as possible and make them equal. It was necessary to break down the barriers between rich and the poor.

Democracy thrives on pressure, because that puts an end to complacency. The populism that we are witnessing today is an expression of what people are: they will pursue their own interests at the expense of others if you let them, and they will pursue the interests of their group at the expense of other groups. They are an expression of what has not been dealt with, and, right or wrong, these are things that have to be dealt with.

Dora Bakoyannis, former foreign minister of Greece

The fear that the economic crisis is contributing to the rise of extremist forces slowly undermining both the legitimacy and the functioning of our political systems is, unfortunately, strong and solid. The 20th century is a frightful reminder that two large totalitarian regimes grew out of the humiliation of war and the unemployment and destitution of large sections of the population.

The more static and “clientelistic” the state, the more fragile and eroded it becomes in times of crisis. By “clientelism” I mean the state’s propensity to borrow in order to buy the sympathies of large sections of the population through state appointments or economic benefits. When the crisis erupts, such favors stop and the favored classes get angry.

This favors a country’s undemocratic sources. Why? Because a crisis needs an explanation. And when the crisis is acute, many people are satisfied only with the harshest of explanations.

The collapse is always blamed on one’s historical enemy. In Greece, the right accuses the left of paralyzing society with its anti-business approach, while the left blames the right for blind servility to the creditors, and so on.

When this antagonism becomes a blame game, with conspiratorial theories cultivated by the media and political forces, the ground is fertile for extreme political forces to profit.

I’ve been working in this Internet medium since 1994, and I take a position that I would describe as “disillusioned illusionist.” In the ’90s, we thought, “This is a great new medium, a revolutionary medium. It’s not controllable by the existing powers. It’s not controlled by majorities.” Since then my mood has changed considerably. I think the Internet is facing its largest crisis in its short history.

Three key figures define, in my opinion, why we are in a crisis.

The first is the former president of China, Jiang Zemin. He initiated the “Great Firewall.” We all thought in the ’90s that this wonderful Internet was not controllable. The Great Firewall, with its increasing perfections, with its tens of thousands of censors, with its enormous energy, proved the opposite. The Internet is controlled in China, and other states are copying the mechanisms and trying to learn from the Chinese, to block opinions that they don’t like and to foster opinions that they do like.

Second, Edward Snowden. Snowden showed us the extent of surveillance now, and what happens if a state decides to put billions into a public/private partnership with the aim of controlling and surveilling the Internet.

The third person is Mark Zuckerberg. We all thought that the “swarm” will, sooner or later, identify what’s propaganda and what’s the truth, what’s public relations and what is reporting.

The perfect organizer of the swarm is Facebook. And as long as we look and watch Facebook — with over a billion users now, more than 20 million in Germany alone — we see that there is not only one swarm, but that there are hundreds of swarms, thousands of swarms, probably millions of swarms. And the people who are part of a swarm like to feel comfortable. They don’t like to fight, they don’t like to debate. What’s evolving is myriad swarms that make their own positions stronger, but which are not communicating with the other swarms.

So the judgment is still out on whether our wonderful new medium is fostering democracy and freedom, or autocratic power, or simply madness.

Nicklas Lundblad, director for public policy and government relations in Europe, Google

We’re caught between our hopes and our fears when it comes to technology. Our hope is this new technology will be “Socratic,” that it will allow us to deepen dialogue, that it will allow us to really become more engaged in democracy, that it will provide more voices to more people.

Our fear is that it will be a sophistic technology, providing only the tools of rhetoric to a small, powerful elite.

New media really gives us three different capacities. The first is to give speech to many more people. The number of people who can actually engage in speech now is a hundred times greater than it was before. Second, new media gives us the ability to organize around party politics and other political causes that we’re interested in. And the third is that it gives us an entirely new means of education.

Now, if you’re a pessimist, you say, “This speech is drowned in noise. So many people speak that nobody is really heard.” As for organization, you say it’s been reduced to simple “clicktivism,” where we lazily just click on something to support a cause, and education is reduced to online quizzes.

To optimists, this speech can really change society and bring a new level of engagement outside the established democratic procedures, and reinvigorate them. And education can be brought to a worldwide audience.

What decides if we end up with Socratic or sophistic technology? The answer is actually fundamental to democratic theory and fundamental also to the way that we have been discussing this today. It has to do with the institutions that need to evolve alongside the technologies and carry them.

And there we have a really interesting mismatch, because the pace of the institutional revolution is radically different from that of the pace of technological process. Bridging that gap is going to determine whether or not we end up in the world of our hopes or our fears. Institutions need to evolve, and they need to figure out how technology can be used in a way that will actually make it a boon to democracy.

Carl Bildt, former prime minister and foreign minister of Sweden (speaking on the day after his party lost general elections in Sweden)

It has been said that democracy never survives a five-minute encounter with the average voter. I’ve had more than five minutes through the last few weeks, and I’m still a fervent believer in democracy. I think what happens, and that’s a good thing in democracies, is that people sometimes want change.

Lord Acton said power tends to corrupt, and I know for certain that power corrupts in our democracies. I do think that regular changes now and then are rather healthy. Any government that has been around for too long, successful or failed, must face the feeling that perhaps some other people should be allowed to try governing the country.

In the long term, however painful it is to lose an election, you know that it is good for the health or the vitality of the political system. I’m coming from a country where in the past we had one party governing for nearly four decades. That was exceedingly bad for the country, and it was exceedingly bad for that party. Since then we’ve changed back and forth, and we are now a more vital, dynamic democracy than we were. So you win some, you lose some, that’s democracy, but the vitality of the country is most important. (...)

It was a fairly bizarre election result, in the sense that we lost and the parliamentary opposition, the leftists, didn’t win. It was this far right, nationalist, populist party, the Swedish Democrats, who more than doubled their seats.

Democracy is demanding, and sometimes people feel that demands of change are too great. That creates what Karl Popper called the strain of civilization, and the risk of people falling back to what he called tribalism. That, I think, is what we’re seeing throughout Europe — too many changes, globalization. They feel left behind, they see foreign faces on the streets that they’re not used to, and then the strain of civilization creates the breeding ground for the populism and the extremism, and that is expressed in these particular political parties.

I’m still optimistic. We’ve seen this before. We can deal with it in a democratic way.